The First Wife of Shiva, and the Seats of the Goddess

Sati is the first wife of Shiva, a daughter of Daksha who marries against her father's wishes and then, when Daksha pointedly insults her husband by omitting him from a great sacrifice, destroys herself in protest, in some tellings casting herself into the sacrificial fire, in others giving up her body through yogic power.

Shiva, maddened with grief, carries her body across the world until it is dismembered (by Vishnu's discus, to release him from his grief), and the places where the pieces fall become the Shakta Pithas, the seats of the Goddess, a great network of pilgrimage sites across the subcontinent whose traditional count varies by text from four to fifty-one or more. She is later reborn as Parvati to be united with Shiva again. A point of history worth stating plainly: the English word suttee, for the burning of a widow on her husband's pyre, derives from Sati's name through European misunderstanding, but the practice and the goddess are not the same thing, and the myth does not have Sati burn on a husband's pyre.